Want To Give Righthaven's Backers A Taste Of Their Own Medicine?

from the getting-meta dept

Okay, I had missed this last week, but this is absolutely hilarious. You may recall, last week we noted the utter hypocrisy of Righthaven's biggest supporter, Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review Journal, defending Righthaven by blatantly copying articles from the blog GametimeIP.com -- and doing so in a manner where it was not at all clear who created the post (I mean, Frederick can't even figure out how to use quotation marks, let alone something as simple as a blockquote).

If you thought it was already convoluted and twisted enough that Frederick would copy someone else's blog to defend his support of Righthaven suing other sites for doing the exact same thing to Frederick and others at the LVRJ, it's now getting even more meta. That's because, as ken points out, the owner of GametimeIP, Patrick Anderson, who had been inundated with questions about this, has decided to put the copyrights for the three blog posts in question up for sale, so that if someone wants to sue Stephens Media and the LVRJ over Frederick's potential infringement, they can do so.

In his explanation for why he is doing so, he basically notes (in much more complicated legalese -- lawyers!) that some of the folks sued by Righthaven over LVRJ content, may find it useful to sue back, in order to highlight the "inconsistent legal positions" of the LVRJ/Stephens Media. And yes, unlike Stephens Media and Righthaven, he's apparently willing to sell all of the Section 106 rights to the buyer...

Re: Re: Re: Odd question #31567

Re: Odd question #31567

Well, a copyright is not so much a "right" but an exclusive government granted privilege for certain uses of an artistic work. The grant itself can be transferred to others, similar to the transfer of property ownership. It's basically the only real legal basis for calling copyright "intellectual property". Some people however have mistakenly assumed that meant the idea of exclusive property rights applied to all aspects of copyright.

Re: Odd question #31567

Dude, "rights" are gotten all sorts of ways. They stem from laws, only one source of which is the Constitution. Your pinched view of the word just fails. And I'm with you on the copyright part--I'm just saying: don't over-simplify to get to the good point.

If anyone buys it they should file with the exact same wording as Righthaven lawsuits including the domain name of the LVRJ and computers etc and $150,0000 in "irreparable damages". Then call them and tell them it is a lot cheaper to settle than fight it.